The Musicademy Cut Out and Keep Guide to Chords in a Key

If you find this useful (or it’s shown you how little you know), take a look at our Playing By Ear in Worship DVD set. This covers all the necessary music theory to make you a far more proficient player.

If you need a bit of help understanding this chart then the following articles might be of help:

This is a nice reference BUT if the chords in parenthesis in the last two columns are meant to be substitutions, the information is incorrect. For example, Cm and Ab/C are different chords and are not interchangable. This should be clarified for those inexperienced players.

Andy Chamberlain

Hi Roy. No they aren’t meant to be substitutions, its simply a chart of the typical chord options in the key that you would come across based on the bass note being played at the time in a song or chord progression. I.e as you mentioned in the key of Ab, Cm is chord 3 and the Ab/C is the 1/3 – so if the bass note goes to a C, in that key the two typical chord options would Cm or Ab/C. In real world scenarios although Cm would be the ‘correct’ chord in the harmonised scale there are far more worship songs that use the 1/3 chord as it tends to ‘pull’ towards chord 4 (Db in the key of Ab) and which is why we included it.

Similarly when a song uses the 7th bass note in the scale (G in the key of Ab) you are much more likely to hear a 5/7 chord used (Eb/G) as that 7th diminished chord sounds quite dark and jazzy so the vast majority of pop based chord progressions choose that 5/7. That said some hymns and carols do make very effective use of diminished chords so its still worth learning some diminished shapes. Hope that clarifes it for you. Thanks

Useful thank you. What I’d really like is software to open up say a Word document then add chords to lyrics which then makes the song sheet for the band, Is there such a thing. Doing this in Word is time consuming and tedious.

Andy Chamberlain

Not that we’re aware of John. Could present some legality issues with effectively producing and distributing unlicensed and illegal song charts to the band. There are various other options though -software programs like CCLI’s Song Select that allow you to select their charts in a key of your choosing or even our own Super Chord Charts that bridge the gap between a chart and a score for non music readers.

It is not common to write music in the key of A#, C# or D# or something like this, because no one would like to read it. There are 12 different keys in the circle of fifth an circle of fourth representing every chromatic note from c – b using enharmonic equivalents.
It would be better to correct the chart to represent proper music theory and to make it more useful and not this confusing by using double b’s and double #’s.

Hi Marcus
Yes, traditionally most
keys are more likely expressed in their flat rather than sharp variant but
we’ve given you both option because in many real world chord charts, keys can
rightly or wrongly be expressed in their # variant. Double sharps can happen, and
people need to understand what’s gong on if they see one. For instance some
guitarists are more likely to write out a chart in G# rather than Ab because
they tend to think in G. It may not be technically traditional but because it
does happen we aim to provide resources that help people’s real world
situations.

musicademy Sorry, but I doubt that. I’ve never seen charts written with chords like C##m – never, maybe if you use some bad transpose algorithms. Who wants to think like that? In fact most worship and gospel and even jazz musicians without any classical training tend to do enharmonic conversion of chords to make them easier to read and don’t care about tonality at all. Just have a look at the many professional tutorial videos and DVDs from the US. They mix up b’s and #’s, but never think of a chord as C##m. I know no guitar player who thinks in A# major instead of Bb major. I doubt any guitar player would tell you about C##m or F##m. It’s more likely that you get a “What the f***” as answer when you tell them to play that chord. But why simple if you can make it complex – even more complex than reality ;-) Your chart could be simple and really helpful by doing it “by the book”.